On the Bus from Oslo to Stockholm

Mary Ahlgren, right, a 60-year-old librarian from Sanbornton, N.H., with her daughter, Kerstin, 26, a graduate student at Columbia University. “My daughter and I wanted to see the Swedish countryside, and a bus is a good way to do it. My family spent three weeks in Sweden when I was about 11. I had met a lot of family then, but they were my fat old great-aunts that I was a little scared of. Well, on this trip we visited my second or third cousins, because the fat old great-aunts are no longer around. One cousin took me to where my grandmother had been born, a very small house up in the woods. It was the highlight of the trip. I really got a sense of why the whole family had to leave Sweden in the early 1900s: there was no way to make a living.”